


A Thing That Carries Itself

by altschmerzes



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Flashbacks, Gen, Holding Hands, Hurt/Comfort, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Episode: s05e01 Nameless Faceless, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Aftermath, Referenced Childhood Sexual Abuse, Tactile Flashbacks, Team as Family, Trust, the mortifying and vital ordeal of being known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28184829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altschmerzes/pseuds/altschmerzes
Summary: In the attack on him in Nameless, Faceless, Hotch was raped by Foyet. There's no blueprint provided on how to survive something like this, and when he begins experiencing tactile flashbacks, he doesn't even know what's happening to him. Only that he can't get it to stop. At least, not until Morgan - literally and metaphorically - offers Hotch a hand.Sometimes the thing that helps you get through something you can't even speak about is the help of someone who's been through it before and knows the way.(or: hotch and morgan, supporting each other through a very similar kind of pain)
Relationships: Aaron Hotchner & Derek Morgan
Comments: 21
Kudos: 56





	A Thing That Carries Itself

**Author's Note:**

> SO i couldn't get it out of my head that it was, imo, *extremely* clear in nameless, faceless that hotch was raped during foyet's attack. they walked all the way up to outright stating it and then never did, or brought it up or followed through on it again, so here's me, doing that. big thoughts on hotch and morgan and how it feels when someone understands you without needing something to be explained.
> 
> this one was... personal. i hope it turned out okay. 
> 
> detailed content warning in the end notes.

> "1.1 History and elegy are akin. The word “history” comes from an ancient Greek verb ίστωρειν meaning “to ask.” One who asks about things – about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell – is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself."
> 
> Anne Carson, _Nox_

There were parts that Aaron was expecting, in the weeks and months following the day he almost died on his living room floor. Things he was ready for, at least intellectually, things the department psychiatrist and his own knowledge and experience told him to brace for. And then there were things that took him by surprise, hit him out of nowhere and left him without so much as the words to really describe what was happening, even inside his own head. He had anticipated that he would, to some degree, relive the events of that day. What he hadn’t anticipated was that this would mean he wouldn’t just relive sights and sounds, emotional responses and the metallic smell of blood, he would also _feel_ it physically, memories of physical sensations so strong it’s like an assault from a phantom.

There’s something else he wasn’t expecting either. When those physical sensations come in vivid recall, it isn’t the knife he feels. It’s Foyet’s hands. Foyet’s hands everywhere, manipulating Aaron’s body like it didn’t belong to him anymore, and it felt like it didn’t. 

At least, when it starts to happen this time, Aaron is alone in his office out of immediate eyeline of anyone who might happen to absently glance around. The shades are down, half-shuttered, like they’d been left for a few days now, further obscuring him from the open-concept arrangement of desks most of his team worked form. It’s a small mercy, under the circumstances. A bandaid over a shrapnel blast, a teaspoon of water in a desert. So small a mercy mixed in with so many great, triumphant cruelties feels like a joke, a trick played on Aaron to rub it all in that much harder.

He paces around the office, walks in short steps and brushes down the fabric of his jacket and his pant legs, like he could wipe the sensation of Foyet’s hands off his stomach or his thighs like it was some irritating burr or stray piece of lint. It doesn’t work and the touch lingers at the edge of Aaron’s awareness, fluctuating in prominence as it fades stronger and weaker in a way he can barely begin to describe inside his own mind. 

Frustrated and nauseated, Aaron sits down at his desk and tries to ignore it by focusing on paperwork. It doesn’t really help and he finds it difficult to concentrate, distracted in the way one would be by the nagging sense of having forgotten something, or an errant clothing tag snagged and pulling at his attention. In a sudden movement so abrupt it sends his chair scooting back several inches, nearly toppling over onto the carpet, Aaron stands up, jolted out of his seat by a sensation of something brushing over his back that sends a shiver up his spine so hard it’s practically a full body spasm. The pacing starts again without even really meaning to, shifting his posture with sharp, agitated movements, rolling his shoulders and shaking himself a little. No matter what he does though, how he moves or what deep breathing exercises he tries to put himself through, it doesn’t stop. It just won’t stop.

Aaron is so distracted by trying to do anything he can to get the feeling to go away, to get not even Foyet’s actual hands but the inescapable, invading memory of them _off_ him, that he somehow manages not to notice when another person arrives in the room. He must not have shut the door firmly when he’d first entered, leaving it closed but without the latch fully caught, meaning it could be opened without turning the handle or making much, if any, sound. It’s not until there’s the quiet noise of someone clearing their throat that Aaron is notified that there’s another occupant of his office now, standing by the doorway watching him. He turns to look so fast it would be impossible to pretend he hadn’t been deeply startled, shaken to the core by the realization that someone had entered and he just hadn’t noticed. A dangerously vulnerable situation to be in, even when you weren’t actively trying to shake the aftershocks of the last time that happened, the last time someone had entered his space and he hadn’t become aware of it until far, far too late.

Standing just inside the door is Derek Morgan. It’s not entirely clear how long he’s been there, but it’s probably been longer than just the single moment it had taken him to open the door and step across the threshold. The look on his face, the deep frown and set of his jaw, indicates that he’s seen at least some of the distress bleeding through into Aaron’s movements and body language, the way he seems to be trying to escape something.

(Which is the truth, isn’t it? Aaron _is_ trying to escape something. He’s trying to escape but he can’t. It’s inescapable, because what he’s trying to get away from is his own body, the crime scene George Foyet made out of him and then condemned him to living trapped inside.) 

Morgan doesn’t seem to know what to say, and anything Aaron could’ve said - a question if Morgan needs something, an order to get out of the office, anything - is locked dead in a chest that feels so tight he can barely get in enough air to keep breathing, never mind produce speech. 

“Hotch, are you alright?” Morgan asks eventually, voice pitched down so as to be inaudible even in the hall outside but deadly serious and obviously concerned. His arms are folded and his frown has gone even deeper, but it’s not an unhappy, contradictory sort of frown. It’s the frown he wears when he looks at the others sometimes, on nights when it’s late and they’re all on their way out but the light in JJ’s office still burns on behind the blinds, days where Reid looks so worn through he might collapse right there on the spot while stubbornly pushing through like someone’s expecting that of him.

It’s an unnerving look for Aaron to see trained his own way. He’s supposed to be untouchable, at least in front of this team. Steadfast, solid. The rock of Gibraltar, that’s supposed to be him. 

Untouchable. The thought is almost funny, almost enough to draw a laugh out of him, if it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t know if his body remembers how to laugh at all these days. 

Shaking his head a little, Aaron tries to answer, to get out a ‘yes, I’m fine,’ a ‘don’t worry about it,’ anything that could’ve gotten Morgan to leave, but he can’t seem to make any of them happen. At the same time, another, more intense feeling rolls over him, pressing into his skin, and Aaron twists, sharp and involuntary, a futile attempt to evade it. He knows Morgan has to have seen it - it wasn’t a large movement, only a few inches of air crossed, but it was sudden and inexplicable and far, far out of character. Aaron is a man of control. He always has been, as long as he can remember, and certainly in the capacity that Morgan has known him. Now, that control has been shattered, not just by what was done to him but by its aftershocks, the way he can’t shake it even though nothing is actually _happening._

“Should I go and get Rossi?” is Morgan’s question. It’s a surprise as much as it isn’t. These people, his team, they’re brilliant, and they’ve known him for years. It would be foolish to think they haven’t picked up on some things, things like the way Dave can, in a way no one else has been able to, consistently convince Aaron to let someone else carry some of whatever is grinding him into the ground this time.

As surprising as the question had been, hearing it put so plainly out loud, it’s even more so to realize that Aaron has an answer immediately, hovering right on the tip of his tongue. He wants to say yes, but can’t quite get the words out.

That’s the good thing about working with brilliant people who’ve known him for years sometimes, though, because even if Aaron can’t get the ‘yes’ out of his mouth, he knows Derek will hear it anyway, will read it in his face and the way his shoulders twitch fractionally towards the door. But as soon as he realizes this, he realizes something else too. Much as Aaron wants to say yes, wants Derek to read his ‘yes’ even though he can’t, he needs to say no. Because if Morgan goes out to get Dave, someone else will see him, and the more people that become involved with this the harder it will be to keep quiet, to hide what’s happening when they’ve all got microscopes on him, eagle eyes tracking his every move for a sign he’s about to crack straight down the middle.

So Aaron has to tell him, croaked out in a half-voice he’d be embarrassed of if there weren’t a hundred other, more humiliating things going on in this situation, “No. No, don’t.”

Morgan doesn’t turn and leave once he’s gotten his answer. It would have been foolish to expect him to. Instead, he says something else, pushes on and tells Aaron, “Okay, I’ll make you a deal - I won’t go and get him, I won’t tell anyone else and this’ll stay between us, but you’ve gotta give me something here. You’ve gotta tell me what’s going on.”

The part of Aaron’s brain that’s not taken up with feeling like a haunted house, a structure besieged by ghosts, understands Morgan’s point even if his first instinct is to fight against the question. He knows he’d have to ask it himself if he walked in somewhere and found one of his team looking like he’s sure he looks now. He’d have to verify they weren’t in any danger first, it would be nothing short of irresponsible if he didn’t. And Aaron knows as well that if he answered that question, Morgan would let it drop. If he reassured the man that he wasn’t in danger and needed to be left alone, that would be that. And he’s all ready to do that, right until the moment he opens his mouth.

He looks at Morgan standing there in his office, the worried frown etched deep on that familiar face, concern practically radiating from him. There’s no hint of any judgement or accusation in his face, just worry. The brush-off dies in Aaron’s throat and he closes his mouth again. 

“What’s going on, man?” The question comes again after a few long moments of no answer arriving, quieter, Morgan taking a step closer and leaving Aaron mildly surprised when it doesn’t make him lurch an instinctive step back.

It isn’t until the words are actually in the air, Aaron’s own voice sounding far away like it belongs to someone else, someone else who’s decided to say these things for him so he doesn’t have to.

“I can feel it,” Aarom hears himself say and the light, taunting brush of fingers across his side makes him flinch hard, like he could escape the phantom sensation by moving away from it in the real world. He can’t. No matter what he does, he can’t. Looking away from his friend and across at a nondescript patch of beige wall, he keeps going. “I can feel the, his…” Every word that leaves his mouth feels like digging shrapnel out of open wounds but Aaron can’t stop. The alternative is leaving the shrapnel where it sits, and he finds he can’t stand that a moment longer. Someone has to know. He has to tell _someone_ how crazy he feels sometimes, when Foyet slips out of the shadows, out of his memory and out of the terribly recent past and won’t stop _touching_ him. “I can _feel,_ it’s his- It’s like I can feel his hands. Everywhere.”

There’s an expression on Morgan’s face when Aaron brings himself to look over at him again, something that leads Aaron to believe that, even if he couldn’t quite get a full and clear explanation out, Morgan understands what he’s saying anyway.

“Tactile flashbacks,” Morgan says, nodding shortly. “From the assault.”

Aaron knows immediately that when he says ‘assault,’ Morgan isn’t referring to the stabbing. He’s referring to the rape. 

It stuns Aaron more than he’d have expected it to, to have it set so clearly before him that Morgan knows. That day in the hospital when Prentiss had asked if he’d wanted to talk about it, Aaron had told her he didn’t remember. That everything after the first stab was a hazed out blur. It had been a lie, a self-protective instinct prompted less by the question itself and more by the way he’d almost told her everything right then and there. The way Aaron had almost told Prentiss, _wanted_ to tell her, had scared him, so he’d swung hard in the opposite direction, informing her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t even recall the attack. After that, he’d kept it up with the rest of the team, repeated the same lie to everyone who’d asked, _I don’t remember, it’s a blur, no, nothing after the first stab, I can’t recall._ Aaron didn’t talk to them about the stabbing and he didn’t tell them about anything else at all. 

Even so, it would be stupid to believe they didn’t know. It would be in the report Aaron still hasn’t been able to read in its entirety, buried at the bottom of his Foyet stack. Everything else he’s pored over time and time again, stared at the photos, read the statements, all except the report on his own near-murder. He knows what’s in it anyway, what they’d all have read in that report when they’d gone over it. Not just about the stabbing, but about the rape as well. Even Garcia knows, he’s sure of it, because this is still their case and his team is nothing if not meticulously prepared. 

They’ve all gone along with the way he’s kept silent on the subject, maybe believing what he’s peddled about not remembering it, maybe, in the far more likely scenario, not wanting to push him to talk about something he wasn’t ready to discuss. It makes things both easier and harder to be aware that they all know, and it certainly makes everything far more complicated. so Aaron carries on pretending that they don’t, if only because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, and they play along.

Until now. 

“Tactile flashbacks,” Aaron repeats, echoing in his own ears like a distant mutter. “Didn’t know that’s what they were called.”

Morgan nods shortly with an understanding in his eyes that tells Aaron even if that part of it hadn’t been in the report, Morgan at least would’ve been able to put it together. Not just because he’s one of the best profilers Aaron's ever met, maybe _the_ best of all of them, but because he’d have recognized in Aaron what he lived with himself. This is something they share now, he and Derek Morgan. It isn’t the same of course, he wasn’t a child when it happened, among other things, but a tiger of a different stripe is still a tiger, and when you wear the scars of one you tend to recognize the wounds left by another.

“I get those,” Morgan tells him, and suddenly is looking away, at some spot on the wall behind Aaron’s shoulder. “Not so often now, but. Used to happen a lot more. Early on.” 

Hearing this hits Aaron hard because he knows what all is going unsaid behind it, the work those words are doing to carry a much longer story

_How,_ he wants to ask suddenly, _how do you survive it?_ Aaron had thought there was something wrong with him, refusing to bring it up with anyone for fear it really did mean Foyet had managed to reach into him and grab onto something vital, twist and break it. Something that he could never fix or even identify to start trying. To hear from Morgan, this man he’d known for years, who he knew bore immeasurable pain but also smiled brighter than just about anyone else Aaron knew, smiled and laughed and renovated houses, built good, strong things and had pride in what he created… To hear from this man that he lived with the same indescribable, ruinous thing Aaron is currently grappling with, unsure how he’ll ever manage to cope with well enough to straighten his spine and live a life again, it’s the first time he’s felt real hope since he’d realized he wasn’t alone in his apartment. 

Determination, sure, determination and resolve and faith in his team that they would do what they needed to do, he’s felt all of that in spades, but hope? Hope for his own life _,_ for what version of himself he could scavenge out of the wreckage? Aaron didn’t think he’d ever feel that again, not until now. Not until Morgan, with a strength and compassion that runs in him so deep it seems he could move mountains with it, managed to somehow scrape open wounds Aaron wouldn’t have ever expected him to speak of voluntarily and flicked on a light Aaron hadn’t known existed in a very dark place.

“How…” Aaron manages eventually, the word empty and inadequate, nothing following as if he’s scraped the bottom of the well and come up dry. “How do you, how…”

Morgan doesn’t answer, not right away. He walks over to the couch at the side of Aaron’s office and sits down, looking uneasy but decided, and gestures at the space beside him. With stiff, unnatural steps, Aaron walks over and joins him, easing himself down and swallowing the wince that rises when injuries that may never fully heal tug and spark with the movement. Only when they’re both sat down, Aaron fighting for the ability to sit still through the events replaying in his body, does Morgan speak.

“I don’t know how to make it stop,” he says, looking down at where he’s got one hand sitting atop his thigh, slowly making a fist and releasing again, a methodic pattern reminiscent of Reid. “The flashbacks. But I do know what might make it easier. Something I can do that might help, if you’ll let me.” Morgan’s hand flattens out, fingers splayed open, then turns, palm-up, and moves away from him and into the space between him and Aaron on the couch. It stills there, an offer. “It’ll give you something real to focus on, something you can feel that’s from here and now, something that’s not- that’s not him. Good input. Safe input, to cancel him out.” 

In the end, Aaron doesn’t think about it for too long. He knows that if he does he’ll talk himself out of it for any of a hundred different reasons, just like he did in the hospital with Prentiss, just like he’s done every one of a dozen-odd different times someone has metaphorically or literally offered a hand to him, and this time he just… can’t do it. Not this time. So Aaron grabs onto Morgan’s hand and hangs onto it, _hard._ Hard enough that he’d be worried he was hurting Morgan if it weren’t for the way that Morgan is gripping him back just as tightly. Their palms press together, fingers digging into the backs of each other's hands with so much force it seems like they’ll fuse.

It’s a kind of shock to the system, the hand holding onto Aaron’s, warm and alive and strong. With Jack separated by such vital necessity and Aaron holding everyone else, even Dave, at arm’s length out of reflex - to protect himself from their knowing exactly how not okay he really is or to protect them from being polluted somehow by that not okay-ness - it’s been a long time since someone touched him like this. He hadn’t realized quite how much he’d been wanting for it even as he’d been afraid of it. And now here’s Morgan, sitting next to him and putting his hand out for Aaron to put his own into and cling to like a life raft in an angry, violent sea, touching him without being afraid either of breaking him or of coming into contact with someone who’s been made into something so fragile and ugly. 

Morgan’s hand in his… it works. It gives Aaron something to focus on at least, just like Morgan had said. Good input. Safe input. Input that’s _real,_ real in a way the tactile flashbacks aren’t. The presence of his teammate, his friend here and now, is enough to override the memory of Foyet, competing types of sensory information that can’t coexist. The memory of someone’s hands taking Aaron apart is simply not strong enough to override the straightforward, fierce care of someone’s hands trying their hardest to hold him together.

A minute passes in which Aaron’s breathing slows and starts to settle, and then Morgan relaxes his hold on Aaron’s hand, which makes his chest hitch all over again. The thought that Morgan would pull away now sends a jolt of panic through him. It’s like he’s been suddenly struck by the ridiculous but overpowering fear that the moment Morgan lets go of him, Foyet will get ahold of him again, grabbing, twisting, digging into his skin. And Morgan… Morgan doesn’t let go. Instead, his grip tightens again.

“I’ve got you,” Morgan says, voice a low rumble that slices through the fog of panic that had begun to seep up into Aaron’s mind again. “Just you and me here, Hotch. I’m not going anywhere.” 

Aaron would feel embarrassed if he weren’t so relieved.

For a long time, they’re both quiet. Sometimes Morgan will shift his grip, relax slightly only to tighten it again, twist his wrist a little, fingers slipping more in line with the ridges and valleys of Aaron’s knuckles. In the lethargic daze of feeling safe for the first time all day, safer than he’s felt at all since before Foyet, Aaron muses it’s probably to keep both their nerve endings from going numb. Or to remind Aaron that he’s still there, to keep them both anchored in the present.

Eventually Morgan starts talking. He stays exactly where he is and just starts talking while they’re still sitting there in Aaron’s office, holding hands. It’s not a long conversation - not much of a conversation at all, really, given Aaron doesn’t participate much outside of the occasional hum to indicate he’s listening - but Morgan explains a little farther, talking in a vague and somewhat uncomfortable tone about competing senses. He repeats himself, saying that it can help to replace one feeling with another.

“Input you can trust,” Morgan says. 

_Input you can trust,_ Aaron thinks, and his fingers flex a little harder.

They don’t discuss it any further, either of them. They just sit there together in Aaron’s office, not talking. Morgan doesn’t make him try and talk about it in general, and he notably doesn’t make a point of saying he’s _not_ going to make him either. Aaron is glad he doesn’t have to try and come up with a response, either to the questions or the promise that there wouldn't be any. 

It's something he's just never been good with. Words. Not when they’re about him. He was incredible in mock trial in law school and can talk circles around suspects now to draw the precise response they need to confirm a theory. But when the topic is Aaron himself, when the focus is inward and he lies under the lens of the microscope of a conversation, he finds himself speechless. He knows he wouldn't be able to find a way to respond to Morgan telling him he doesn’t have to talk about it, never mind actually trying to _talk about it._ Even if he wanted to - and he does, sometimes, in a way he can’t even explain to himself, he _wants to_ \- Aaron doesn’t think he’d know how. He doesn’t have the language. 

And Morgan, because he knows this somehow, or maybe because he doesn’t have the words either, doesn’t try and make him. 

They just sit together, silent, in Aaron’s office, the reality of Morgan’s hand stronger and louder and infinitely more real than the aftershock echo of Foyet’s invasive, destroying fingers. He’s not sure how long they’re there for, and he doesn’t want to try and figure it out, because he’s a little afraid of what the answer might be. Morgan doesn’t move the entire time except for those small shifts of his grip, the sporadically fluctuating, adjusting pressure keeping it all real, reminding Aaron that they’re both there, alone, safe. When they finally part, it’s because Aaron relaxes his hold, stretching out fingers that have gone stiff and half-numb from the ferocity with which he’d clutched onto the warm, living lifeline Morgan had offered him. There’s an ache left behind, dull and faint and nothing at all like the pain left in the scars that will, in more ways than one, never quite all the way heal. 

“Thank you,” Aaron says when Morgan is halfway out of his office, seemingly ready and willing to leave without another single word exchanged between them. Morgan looks back, expression unreadable, and nods. Not feeling like he’d quite gotten his point out as clearly he’d meant to, as strongly as he’d meant to, shown Morgan the depth and enormity of what the man had just done for him, Aaron repeats it. “Derek. Thank you.” He hopes, if nothing else, the use of Morgan’s first name is enough to get at least some of it across. 

Morgan nods again, slow and serious, and Aaron knows he understands. Of course he does. He understands better than either of them will ever have the words for. 

* * *

It’s the kind of case that rattles everyone on the team, in their own varied ways. The ones with children always are. This time, though, there’s an extra curveball thrown in the mix, one that ensures Aaron knows he has to keep a closer eye on one of his people than the others, even beyond the usual tabs he keeps when he knows they’re liable to be shaken by what they’ve seen. The victims are the same age and general demographic Morgan had been when he was being abused by Buford. He handles it well enough, not that Aaron would’ve expected any less, but something shifts as soon as the case is over and another town’s boogeyman is behind bars.

On the way home, Aaron sees Morgan at the back of the plane, set away from everyone else. The day’s worn late and the sky outside the window at his elbow is dark. The team is giving him some space and Aaron with them, until he notices it. Morgan is agitated. Not in any kind of obvious way, nothing large or overt, but Aaron picks up on it with the sharp eye of experience. Every so often Morgan shifts, adjusting his position or rolling his shoulders against the seat back. His hands twitch, one at his chin propping his head up, the other curled into a fist on the table in front of him. As Aaron watches, his fingers flex out and seem to almost shiver, then tuck back into a clenched ball of disquiet.

Though he’s not completely sure, Aaron is at least reasonably certain he knows what he’s seeing. It’s the same thing Morgan had seen when he’d walked into Aaron’s office, though harder to detect, more subtle after decades more practice both dealing with it and learning how to keep it hidden. Tactile flashbacks. Morgan is having tactile flashbacks, Aaron would bet his life on it. And he can’t just sit here and pretend he doesn’t see it, doesn’t know now, viscerally from the feel of it on his own skin, what that’s like. 

So Aaron gets up from his own seat. He stands slowly and casually, drawing attention only from Reid, who tilts his head in a question that Aaron answers only with a slight shake of his own in return. Thankfully, Reid doesn’t try and ask any questions out loud, returns to the complicated game of solitaire he’s mindlessly flipping through on the table between him and prentiss and JJ. Prentiss is asleep, slumped over just far enough that she’s leaned against JJ’s shoulder, JJ flipping through something on her phone while glancing at the woman next to her every so often. Dave is across from them on the couch, legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankle just as his arms cross over his chest, looking out the window across from him with a thick frown. No one is watching Aaron as he walks down the narrow aisle to the far end of the plane, far enough any words they may exchange would be muffled by the sound of engines if they speak lowly enough. 

“Are you alright?” he asks, quiet and ready to back off if told to. Morgan nods, jarring the arm he’s using to prop his head up as he does. He’s not wearing headphones. It’s a true indicator of how deeply he’s been affected by this case if he’s not even bothering to try and distract or relax himself.

“Yeah,” is the barely audible answer.

Derek Morgan is a good liar. They’re all good liars - they’re profilers. If they didn’t know how to lie and act and put up a good face they’d never be able to do this job, and Morgan is better than most. And that… That right there was a bad, an _abysmal_ lie. There’s something to be said for being a profiler, working with profilers, and what it does to the way you can say things without needing to say them at all. After a certain point, lying badly enough becomes functionally the same as telling the truth. 

Not wanting to overstep or crowd Morgan, screw this up somehow, Aaron nevertheless feels the unshakeable need to do something. That terrible lie, the one he’d seen the truth of in less than half a moment, is an opening he can’t, in good conscience, pretend he hasn’t seen. He can’t ignore it and go back to his own place, not when Morgan has stepped up for the team and for Aaron in particular in countless, thankless ways in the past year. 

So Aaron sits down next to Morgan, who he can still see fidgeting in his seat, shifting like he’s uncomfortable in his skin, like he doesn’t want to be in it, doesn’t want to feel what he’s feeling in it. With what he hopes doesn’t come across as awkwardly as he’s afraid it will, Aaron holds out his hand hand over the armrest separating the seats in the same way Morgan had done that day in his office. Fingers splayed, palm up, a silent offer of the same support that had been extended to him.

There’s a moment’s hesitation in the way Morgan’s own hand, the one not propping his head up, twitches in response, tendons going tight and visible, a barely detectable, halting shake. Aaron looks away to take as much of the pressure off as possible, looks at the shiny surface of the little plane table, the slight nick in the resin that catches oddly in the light. He can wait for Morgan to make up his mind. Aaron has all the time in the world. 

Offering someone your hand is different than taking the one that’s offered to you in turn. It’s a different kind of trust. A harder kind, he thinks, at least it probably is for Morgan. Nothing about what the team knows of what happened to him was something he chose to share. It had to come out when they were in Chicago, of course it did, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an awful, re-traumatizing experience that Aaron regrets needing to participate in more than he regrets almost anything else in his career. Morgan deserves to have as much time as he wants to decide what he’s going to do here, whether he’s going to ignore the offer or accept it, give any more vulnerable pieces of himself away.

And then Aaron feels it. The hand that settles onto his palm, fingers curling around his, first lightly and then harder, until Morgan is holding onto him as tightly as Aaron had held on in the office. 

_Safe input,_ Aaron thinks, _input you can trust,_ and the weight of what he’s been given doesn’t escape him for a moment. 

The engines roar dully outside the plane and the moments tick by, slow and hazy. Next to him, Aaron can feel Morgan relax in increments, agitation bleeding out of him, body stilling out of the uncontrollable fidgeting that had first caught Aaron’s attention. 

Morgan doesn’t really seem okay, obviously not. Nobody could expect him to be - Aaron certainly doesn’t. He knows at least that it didn’t magically fix everything for him in his office, when Morgan had sat there for what felt like endless minutes with what seemed like endless reserves of patience, ready to hold his hand and keep him steady for as long as Aaron needed. But things had eased. The snaring hold of the memory had loosened, and he hopes the memories putting Morgan under siege now have been similarly weakened. 

Regardless, Aaron is determined to stay here as long as he’s needed, as long as Morgan wants him to. He doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t have any desire to and refuses to give any hint that might be interpreted as wanting to escape the situation. Instead, he sits there, resolute. A sentry. The rock of Gibraltar. He remembers in particular how much it had meant, though he’d never been able to get it into words, that Morgan hadn’t pulled away. Had let Aaron be the one to decide when to let go. If he can do nothing else, Aaron can extend him the same autonomy now, and so he’s going to sit here, holding Morgan’s hand all night if that’s what he needs. 

Morgan twitches a little, just the slightest jerk of his shoulders, his fingers flexing around the back of Aaron’s hand tight enough to elicit a slight ache. In response, Aaron grips that much harder himself, a wordless message, an echo of what Morgan had said to him before. 

_You’re here and I’m here and he’s not. It’s just me and you. And I’m not going anywhere._

**Author's Note:**

> detailed content warning: though there is no description of the event itself and the memories aren't graphic, this fic does focus largely on the aftermath of hotch having been raped by foyet in nameless, faceless. it also addresses, though with even less detail, morgan being a survivor of sexual abuse as a child, and there's a very brief mention of a case involving children.


End file.
